Talk to us about breaking boundaries

Health knows no bounds.And neither should healthcare.

Talk to us about breaking boundaries

Westchester Medical Center Health Network (WMCHealth) has been delivering exemplary patient care for decades and was making performance improvements continuously. However, they were looking to make more impactful operational improvements in their Cath and EP Labs.

They turned to Philips as an innovative and trusted partner – that could help them enhance their operations and implement changes in support of their long-term strategy. A Philips-client project team was formed with a focus on patient care, operational improvement, and financial returns.

Philips is enabling us to transform our care delivery network and better serve the Hudson Valley.”

Michael D. Israel

President and CEO, Westchester Medical Center Health Network

A holistic approach

Our consulting team always takes a patient-focused, end-to-end, collaborative approach and this project was no different. A Philips-WMCHealth project team was agreed including clinicians and other staff, consultants, and management representatives. They were tasked to look at the challenge holistically, review data metrics and stakeholder input, discuss and test recommendations, and agree prioritized change initiatives which had the potential of making the greatest impact.

The consultants approached this challenge by first collecting comprehensive patient and system data, reviewing the scheduling guidelines, observing the staff workflow, and analyzing the facility layout.

Next, they looked to define what quality meant to the key stakeholders, including patients, family members, physicians, and staff by conducting one-on-one and group interviews, group workshops, and facilitated role-playing exercises. This allowed the team to interpret the data and operational analysis through the lens of the patient experience.

The Solution

The experience flow map proces

Based on the information gathered earlier, the team created two large experience flow maps that documented the end- to-end patient journey and graphically summarized the data analyses, patient, family, and staff interviews, and the workflow observations.

The experience flow maps helped the WMCHealth team easily understand and agree where performance improvements could be made. These clinical process and workflow change recommendations were reviewed by the Philips-WMCHealth project team and the final recommendations were presented to the executive sponsors by the WMCHealth project leads.

Change recommendations included:

New pre-admissions testing process

Revised pre-Cath Lab process

Facility upgrades

New scheduling technology

More flexible nurse staffing

Dedicated resource for supply management and data analysis

Scheduling guidelines

The Philips team also created a cloud-based application dashboard for visualization of case volumes by type, by room, and by physician. The WMCHealth team has been using the new dashboard to identify areas of concern and track performance.

Results

Reduced patient wait times by 20%

Attainedearlierfirst-casestarts

Increased utilization of their Cath and EP labs

Enhanced the patient experience and staff satisfaction

Looking forward

WMCHealth has implemented many of the recommended change initiatives and has reduced patient wait times by 20%. They also expect to increase overall patient capacity, earlier first-case starts, and utilization of their Cath and EP labs, as well as improve staff satisfaction and enhance the overall patient experience.

20%

reduction

in patient wait times

Who/where

Westchester Medical Center Health Network (WMCHealth)

Challenges

Improve the quality of operations in their Cardiac Catheterization / Electrophysiology Labs.

Solution

Philips analyzed the current-state of the client’s operational processes, then created experience flow maps to summarize the analysis, which led to change recommendations and a project implementation plan.

The Westchester Medical Center Health Network (WMCHealth) is a 1,700- bed healthcare system headquartered in Valhalla, New York, with 10 hospitals on eight campuses spanning 6,200 square miles of the Hudson Valley. WMCHealth is pre-eminent provider of integrated healthcare in the Hudson Valley.

Results from case studies are not predictive of results in other cases. Results in other cases may vary.

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